What's old is new again

When I dropped traditional phone service (and even Vonage) for a more DIY phone system, there was a sharp decrease in the number of fees added to the bill. I'm still paying monthly for E911, but that's only for one line... the PBX rewrites caller ID for the different lines in the house to one number for 911 calls, which works because they're all at the same physical location.

I always assumed that the others were covered somehow in the normal charges from my VoIP providers, or that they just didn't apply anymore. Well, I wasn't quite correct in that assumption.

My main VoIP provider, Vitelity, is starting to charge for the Universal Service Fund, and is doing it at payment time when people refill their prepaid balances with them. I pay enough to cover 3 months at a time, so that means I still have one more tax-free month. They're doing a credit for those with non-voice services on their account, but I don't know if I'll see any of that, as they give things like dedicated servers as examples. I do have a fax-to-email number on mine, though, so we shall see.

At the very least, it 1) is less than $40/year at the moment and 2) can be partially expensed as 2 of the lines are business related. It'll certainly make calculating those expenses more interesting, though.

Now I'm left wondering if the other provider I use, Gafachi, will be doing something similar at some point.